Did you try ParagonWiki?
ParagonWiki: Praetoria
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I did, and it helps, but I was really hoping to get a more personal perspective, with the kind of experienced, insightful viewpoint you find in a lot of COX guides. Paragon wiki is good, but it can't give you the kind of first person nuggets of advice you get in things like "Thoughts of a Level 50 spines scrapper."
I'm not sure if this is what you want but Zombie Man has a guide to the different Arcs and what order you need to do them in to avoid getting locked out. Is that what you want?
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=235373
Zombie Man has a guide for getting all the contacts if that's your thing http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=235373 .
Power, Responsibility, and Warden are three sides of the same coin. Crusader is Project Mayhem with even less (as in no) scruples.
There's no Ouro for Praetoria, so if you care about badges be sure to make at least 5 morality choices (the one in the tutorial counts) and choose Resistance and Loyalist at least once. Avid Reader is the tutorial badge but you can apparently get that one from the iTrials now, not sure on that.
You'll get introduced to the next zone's contacts before you outlevel your current zone. Find Contact is your friend if you need to find an alignment's starting contact for your current zone when that happens. Find Contact is basically your best friend in Praetoria. Nova is good thru and including 10, Imperial 15, Nuetropolis 20. After those levels you've forever lost the chance to be able to do the final missions and thus make the morality choice for the contacts in those zones. Morality choice missions are solo player missions so you *HAVE* to have the mission to do it.
Thanks Folks! Zombie man's guide is a big help, but I was looking for a big source of tips like Ogi's--First hand experience on what to watch out for in Praetoria. Maybe it's not out there, but we've cobbled together a good start in this thread.
The easiest way for me is to pick one of the 4 main storylines and play through it. You can, of course, use the guide to hit all of them at once, if you prefer.
Once you get past the original Praetorian zones, things change a bit. At level 20, you can either continue into regular blue or red, or go straight to First Ward where there is only one storyarc. You can actually do both, if you prefer, since heroes and villains can do the Wards as well as Praetorians.
Quote:
The biggest badge gotchas in Praetoria is the Moral Highground (5 morality choices) badge and Loyalist or Resistance (choose that morality's option in a morality mission) badges since there's no Ouro.|
Originally Posted by Gunstock Warclub
First hand experience on what to watch out for in Praetoria.
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Zombie Man's guide covers the contact conflicts if you're not just doing one morality's arcs, which you'll have to do one of outside your preferred morality to get Moral Highground. I think it also covers who shows up in the leaving Praetoria mission depending on the choices you make. That doesn't affect anything badge-wise just if you want certain NPCs there on your send off.
Every other badge can be earned by anyone.
The Failed Experiments defeat badge is most easily done through one of the arcs but I can't remember which. They are in the underground, just not in large numbers though.
A dev said that they toned down the mobs a bit (it did seem a bit easier than I remember the first time I started a Praetorian) but still be ready for the more "exotic" damage types (energy, fire) and ranged and AoE to be more common than blueside and lots of ambushes. "Boom baby!". Some mob types are very hard to mez and those tend to hit very hard.
The event badges use a personal participation metric to get the badge and emote reward tier so don't drag in some 50s and sit in a corner.
If you team at all you'll likely need to level lock to finish a zone's arc. The solo missions make teaming a pain.
That's about all I can think of. The ones that can't be fixed are contact conflicts and Moral Highground.
Oh, First Ward and Night Ward assume you took the Warden path, regardless of what you did and the contacts don't "remember" your actions 1-20.
Also, you can go to Pocket D and do events there and you could queue for the Summer Block Buster, I didn't try the Halloween one, as a Praetorian but there's no Praetorian love for DfB or DiB. No task forces or trials either so no WSTs for a Praetorian that hasn't gone red or blue.
If I'm harping on the badges it's because my badger Praetorian went loyalist every choice and thus missed the resistance badge. Initally they said Praetoria would be added to Ouro.
I periodically start Praetorian alts when I feel like a change in the storyline. I've always been more story-focused than badge-focused, so I'll just do one set of arcs per character per zone.
Praetoria is very story-heavy, and often times running one set of arcs will illuminate an aspect of what's going on in another arc. It's also nice to have a decent knowledge of the existing lore in Primal Earth, so you can recognize the parallel characters. In any case, read all the text; most of it is very well done. And play around with dialog trees, too. For example, with Praetor White's "pick flowers for Cleopatra" mission, try choosing the "really, they're from me" choices as long as you can.
Side-switching can be fun; you can either play the other side's arcs straight, or you can work undercover. You can only work undercover for the side you chose at the end of the tutorial though, so if you originally chose resistance, you can work undercover in the loyalists, but you can't inform the loyalists what the resistance is up to. The "working undercover" option is mostly a series of phone calls to your faction leader at key moments that imply a slightly different outcome for the mission, but they rarely change gameplay in any way.
You can play loyalist/responsibility and resistance/warden arcs no matter what your current alignment is. You can only do loyalist/power and resistance/crusader arcs if you have chosen the appropriate side in your most recent morality mission.
Praetorian enemies tend to be tougher, and spawn placements are different too. Even if you recognize the maps (say, offices are the same maps with a spiffy mid-century modern makeover), the spawns won't be in the same places. Spawns in tunnels maps can be rather close to each other, especially right at the bottom of the entrance stairs. Pulling can be a lifesaver.
The Underground zones are notably trickier than the aboveground zones. In the Underground zones, everything will attack you and it can be harder to avoid aggroing spawns. The ceilings are too low for most travel powers, and although you can move out of the aggro range in some areas, others (like the narrow passages at the tops of stairs) will force you to go right next to them. It's always possible to outrun them, though, so I just put sprint on, check the map in safe locations and run to my location. I never take enough damage to kill me, though a couple of times, I've had to rest as soon as I enter the mission.
A few things are more convenient: enemies will only drop DOs of a type you can use, there's just one store that buys and sells all enhancements, and enemies can drop any type of salvage. Auction houses are only in Nova Praetoria (Resistance have one in the base underground, too), and crafting tables are only available in that zone, too. The auction house will suppress all your powers and drop your toggles; the resistance version does neither.
That's all I think of offhand.
I'm new to this game anyway, but after playing in COH for a few weeks I started up an alt in Praetoria just to check it out. And it seems very different, and a little confusing. Does anyone know of any basic guides for newbies to Praetoria, especially one comparing and contrasting it to Primal Earth? Sure seems like something like that would exist, but I'm coming up dry in forum searches, and I didn't see anything in the Guide to Guides either. If there is no such guide, I would also be glad (ius!) to hear any Praetoria pointers you could offer. Thanks!